Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Police have arrested and charged four young adults for last week’s vandalism of the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center, and have determined that the destruction was not a hate crime.

New York representative Jerrold Nadler will reintroduce a federal bill on Thursday that would allow gay Americans to sponsor their foreign-born domestic partners for U.S. citizenship.

Elena Kagan, current Harvard Law School Dean and Obama’s nominee for the nation’s solicitor general (the attorney who represents the government before the Supreme Court and the nation’s appeals courts), is very opposed to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Kagan has called the military’s ban on gays “a moral injustice of the first order,” adding, “The importance of the military to our society—and the extraordinary service that members of the military provide to all the rest of us—makes this discrimination more, not less, repugnant.”

Massachusetts has changed its policies for changing gender on state driver’s licenses; a transgender person now needs only to fill out a form signed by a doctor confirming their gender identification, and will no longer have to provide proof of sexual reassignment surgery or an amended birth certificate.

Fort Lauderdale residents are casting their ballot today for a new mayor, and two of the four candidates are openly gay.

Arizona’s new domestic partnership registry will give same-sex couples hospital visitation rights. A couple interviewed for the story sums it up best: "It's sad that we have to deem this a huge deal, but this is a step in the right direction. Progress is progress."